In-Store Advertising Will Soon Look You Straight in the Eye!

The next time you’re waiting to pay at Tesco, the ads you’re watching may be watching you back. Britain’s biggest retailer is rolling out screens with built-in cameras at its gas stations that can identify people by their gender and approximate age, and customize ads based on who is watching.

The ads will come from U.K. digital media company Amscreen, which uses face-tracking technology from French firm Quividi to identify key traits in individuals and relay information back to marketers in real time. The system also measures how long people pay attention to the ads, which could theoretically let companies tweak their ads to make them more effective, much as online advertisers do with Google AdWords.

“Yes, it’s like something out of Minority Report,” Amscreen CEO Simon Sugar told U.K. trade publication The Grocer. He hopes to roll out the screens in U.K. supermarkets as well. In Tesco’s 450 U.K. gas stations, ads will run for 10 seconds each in a 100-second loop; the screens are expected to see and be seen by about 5 million adults a week.

The data that is collected and aggregated by Amscreen isn’t quite as creepy as some competing systems: Japan’s NEC uses face recognition to measure how often individuals shop at a given store, and Italy’s Almax has a camera embedded in a mannequin’s eye that can identify not only age and sex but also race. RetailNext and Brickstream use cameras to track individual shoppers and also monitor their mobile phones to see if they’re repeat shoppers.